Quote:
...Tyche have Vespasians heavyset manly profile which was bizarre
At the risk of appearing to highjack the thread (sorry, Eric), let's go one-up on the bizarre. How about a bearded, transgender god that might be Tyche - or perhaps just an odd mash-up of Tyche and Zeus?
On the Parthian tets of Phraates II, die engravers referenced the Tyche reverses of Demetrios I Soter and the Zeus reverses of Alexander I Balas of the Seleukid Empire. The Parthians had supplanted the Seleukids in that part of Western Asia but, at least early on, tried to copy the regional Greek archetypes for the coinage. The models for the reverse are:
Well, note what happened on the unique reverse of Phraates II's tetradrachms:
As Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis points out in
Religious Iconography on Ancient Iranian Coins, "The religious iconography of the Hellenistic Tyche figure was clearly unfamiliar to the Arsacid court and the (Parthian) die engraver at the end of the second century BC, as otherwise the attributes of a female goddess would not have been used for a clearly male figure."
As CNG states it, "The god depicted on the reverse of these tetradrachms appears on no other Parthian coin, and apparently nowhere else...Such a representation of a transgender pantheistic deity is very unusual in ancient art. One wonders if the artist...simply misunderstood the types he was copying."
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=131058Mine:
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/ga...radrachm.jpg
Posted 10/06/2019 09:27 am
